Cuttings: August 2025

A wise rabbi – post by Cynthia Bourgeault in Daily Meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation, adapted from her The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind: A New Perspective on Christ and His Message. “Within the … Near East (including Judaism itself), [one of the kinds of religious authority was] a moshel moshelim, or teacher of wisdom, one who taught the ancient traditions of the transformation of the human being. These teachers of transformation – among whom I would place the authors of the Hebrew wisdom literature such as Ecclesiastes, Job, and Proverbs – may be the early precursors to the rabbi whose task it was to interpret the law and lore of Judaism (often creating their own innovations of each). The hallmark of these wisdom teachers was their use of pithy sayings, puzzles, and parables rather than prophetic pronouncements or divine decree. They spoke to people in the language that people spoke, the language of story rather than law…. Parables, such as the stories Jesus told, are a wisdom genre belonging to mashal, the Jewish branch of universal wisdom tradition, which includes stories, proverbs, riddles, and dialogues through which wisdom is conveyed…. Jesus not only taught within this tradition, he turned it end for end. …There has been a strong tendency among Christians to turn Jesus into a priest – 'our great high priest’ (see the Letter to the Hebrews). But Jesus was not a priest. He had nothing to do with the temple hierarchy in Jerusalem, and he kept a respectful distance from most ritual observances. Nor was he a prophet in the usual sense of the term: a messenger sent to the people of Israel to warn them of impending political catastrophe in an attempt to redirect their hearts to God. Jesus was not that interested in the political fate of Israel, nor would he accept the role of Messiah continuously being thrust upon him. His message was not one of repentance (at least in the usual way we understand it) and return to the covenant. Rather, he stayed close to the ground of wisdom: the transformation of human consciousness. He asked those timeless and deeply personal questions: What does it mean to die before you die? How do you go about losing your little life to find the bigger one? Is it possible to live on this planet with a generosity, abundance, fearlessness, and beauty that mirror Divine Being itself? These are the wisdom questions, and they are the entire field of Jesus’ concern.“

The Origin of the Research University – article by Clara Collier on Asterisk, referenced in John Naughton’s Observer column. “If you were alive in 1800 and someone asked you about the future of research, it wouldn’t occur to you to mention the university. Real scholarship happened in new, modern, enlightened institutions like the British Royal Society or the French Académie des sciences. Universities were a medieval relic. And nowhere was it more medieval, hidebound, and generally dysfunctional than in the German-speaking world. But something happened to German universities at the turn of the 19th century – they developed a new system that combined teaching with research. Within a few decades, everyone in Europe was trying to copy their model. German scientists dominated chemistry and revolutionized modern physics. They came up with cell theory, bacteriology, the whole laboratory-based model of scientific medicine, and I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that they invented the social sciences in almost full generality. By the end of the century, they were the greatest engine of organized knowledge production the world had ever seen – and if they’ve since been surpassed by the American university system, that’s mostly because we copied them. I think we don't properly appreciate how surprising this is. It’s odd that the research university exists at all. Universities have been around for a thousand years, but for most of their history, they were not seen as institutions for producing new knowledge. It’s even stranger that it came to be in a land which was politically fragmented, lacked a strong scientific community, and had very limited interest in creating one. So I can’t help but ask: Why Germany? Why universities? Why does the entire modern institutional research ecosystem look the way it does? …”

Academia: The Questions Are Big! It’s the Curricula That Got Small – online article by Timothy Burke, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. "Kalaitzidis’ essay, ‘How Generative AI Fixes What Higher Education Broke’, doesn’t convince me that AI is actually the fix, but it does convince me that AI exposes what was already broken about higher education, especially in institutions that claim they’re built around the idea of ’liberal arts’, and that no response to generative AI that stands pat on the status quo version of higher education circa 2015 or so is going to pass muster.…Most of us force students to quickly commit to the course of study that a discipline offers and then, as he puts it, 'enforce behaviorism', e.g. to perform the signs of disciplinary commitment in advance of actually being able to reflectively consider or understand that discipline, and those signs turn out to be measurable repetitions of what the discipline knows and does, so that we can prove via tests, grades, metrics and assessments that the discipline has been learned step by step, in measured increments. Kalaitzidis writes, ‘Assessments measure retention, reproduction, and formal compliance. Rubrics reward correctness within predefined bounds. Curricula scaffold students towards compliant outcomes, not transformative ones…despite overtures to critical thinking, students find success in stimulating insight, not generating it. Successful students understand the game and play it well.’… In this analysis, generative AI is almost a Brechtian device that reveals the mismatch between our self-understanding and our practices. Generative AI in ’excelling at the rituals mistaken for learning: symbolic reproduction, surface compliance, and decontextualized recall’ forces a crisis among educators, and regretfully, in his view, many of them 'double down' and commit with even more intensity and rage to ’militarization’, to the maintenance of an ’academic police state’ that seeks with even more fervor to prevent AI-enabled cheating…. Kalaitzidis’ essay imagines a more thorough reorientation of higher education, intended to align its deep aspirations with its practical operations. … High-function/high-formalism [in a four quadrant matrix] … is both what he thinks a liberal education should strive to be, where its characteristic epistemologies and pedagogies match its declared aspirations and values and where he thinks generative AI can be a net positive, a ’thought partner’. Some examples of high-function, high-formalism curricular design, in his reading: ‘Cognitive Apprenticeship; Case-Based Learning; Problem-Based Learning; Design Thinking; Socratic Method; Research Practicum; Simulation’.… What I think liberal education needs is for the first year of a four-year program to look structurally like what we claim is happening in liberal education. Big questions, exploration, the cultivation of student agency, rich conversation, open-ended experimentation and experience.… What if the first year of a liberal education was just asking all the questions that arise out of being alive without immediately wrestling them into manageable, reduced, compartmentalized, organized, time-compressed pathways of study and skill development? … Apropos of this proposal, here’s Claude’s list of the ten most interesting questions to think about and learn about: 1. What is consciousness? 2. How should we live together? 3. What is our place in the universe? 4. How to distinguish truth from falsehood? 5. What does it mean to be human? 6. How do we find meaning and purpose in existence? 7. What is the nature of time and change? 8. How do we balance freedom and responsibility? 9. What are the limits and possibilities of human knowledge? 10. How do we navigate the relationship between technology and humanity?

‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse – article by Damian Carrington in The Guardian. "[Goliath's Curse by Dr Luke Kemp of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge] covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens. Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots. The work is scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct, such as when setting out how a global collapse could be avoided. 'Don’t be a dick' is one of the solutions proposed, along with a move towards genuinely democratic societies and an end to inequality. His first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers.... Instead Kemp uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society built on domination, such as the Roman empire: state over citizen, rich over poor, master over slave and men over women. He says that, like the biblical warrior slain by David’s slingshot, Goliaths began in the bronze age, were steeped in violence and often surprisingly fragile.... 'History is best told as a story of organised crime,' Kemp says. 'It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.'"

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech’ will build us all a better world – article by Eleanor Drage in The Guardian. "There’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. That’s because we have been persuaded to believe that innovative technology is whatever bombastic billionaires claim it is, whether that’s commercial spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative AI tools.... The real pioneering technologies of today are genuinely useful systems I like to call 'frugal tech', and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don’t impose top-down 'solutions' that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. It turns out that genuinely innovative technology really can set people free.... The fact is, while generative AI is lauded as the technology of the minute, iterations such as Dall-E 3, Google Gemini and GPT are irrelevant to those who don’t have enough internet bandwidth to use them. The new digital divide is the gap between the top end of the global population – who have access to these power-intensive technologies – and those at the bottom, whose internet access, or lack of, remains static. That’s why some of today’s most brilliant minds are working out how to manage the trade-off between internet range and bandwidth, and whether there are obstacles in the way such as mountains and foliage."

Support for hardline anti-immigration policies linked to ignorance about migration figures, poll suggests – report by Andrew Sparrow in The Guardian. "YouGov has released detailed polling on attitudes to immigration that shows a clear link between having hardline anti-immigrant views and being ignorant about the level of illegal immigration into the UK. It is well known that many people massively over-estimate the extent to which irregular migration contributes to the overall net migration figures, which reached a record high of 900,000 in the year ending June 2023.... But the YouGov polling also found that almost half of respondents thought there were more immigrants staying in the UK illegally than legally, and that only 19% said that there was 'much more' legal than illegal immigration (which is almost certainly the correct answer, even allowing for the very highest estimates of the level of unauthorised migration). And YouGov established that people saying, wrongly, that there is 'much more' illegal migration than legal migration are much more likely to be in the group saying large numbers of recent migrants should be returned."

What Happened at Hiroshima: this rushed, flimsy look at a world-changing atrocity isn’t good enough – review by Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. "Last year, the documentary Atomic People told the stories of some of the survivors of the nuclear bombs dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of them nonagenarians, some in their hundreds, they described with unfaltering clarity their experiences of being caught in the blast.... It was a harrowing, strangely ethereal and delicate 90 minutes of film, as interviewees remembered what their cities were like before the bombs, before the silver shimmer of the B-29 they all recall was first glimpsed against the clear blue sky. They closed their eyes and the very earliest days of childhood lived again. The documentary did not mark any particular anniversary – simply the fact that time was running out for these people, silenced for so long, to tell their stories, allowing them to function, in so far as is ever possible, as the warnings from history they want to pass on. The half-hour of What Happened at Hiroshima, marking the 80th anniversary of the bombings, feels, by contrast, like a rushed, crass thing – a duty done, a commissioning box ticked and a presenter, the journalist Jordan Dunbar, required to try to make up for its slightness by emoting instead. For many, perhaps, this will be the appropriate mode of delivery. I, however – ancient, intolerant, embittered on top of natural cynicism and reserve – still feel it as an unnecessary intrusion into a piece. Detachment and stoicism is what allows others’ stories to be thrown into the sharp, stark relief they deserve. Anything else, I think, pulls focus and does a disservice to the viewer and, more importantly, the subjects.... We’re left with ... a furrowed brow and a bathetic comment that the people in charge may not be listening to survivors’ stories. When this generation is gone, asks Dunbar, will our leaders really understand what it means to push the button? This is where my patience really ran out. To descend to this level of asininity after the quiet dignity and appalling suffering recounted by contributors representing such a colossal, profound, world-changing event simply won’t do.... Perhaps this programme was intended for a younger, more tender demographic than mine and I am judging it by entirely the wrong criteria. I hope so. But I also hope that we can always distinguish between the need to reach and educate new audiences and the impulse to do so by pandering to them."

The 100 best nonfiction books, No 34: Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946) – article by Robert McCrum in The Guardian. "Hersey decided to focus his narrative on the lives of a few chosen Hiroshima witnesses. As soon as he reached the ravaged city, he found six survivors of the bombing whose personal narratives captured the horror of the tragedy from the awful moment of the explosion. This gave Hersey his opening sentence, a unique point of view, and a narrative thread through a chaotic and overwhelming mass of material. In a style later developed and popularised by the 'new journalism' of the 1960s, the opening of Hiroshima pitches the reader into the heart of the story, from the viewpoint of one of its victims: 'At exactly 15 minutes past eight in the morning on 6 August, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.' From here, Hersey embarks on an exploration of the lives of five other interlocutors: the Rev Mr Kiyoshi Tanimoto, of the Hiroshima Methodist church, who suffers radiation sickness; Mrs Hatsuyo Nakamura, a widow with three children; one European, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit priest who had endured exposure to radiation; and finally, two doctors – Masakazu Fujii and Terufumi Sasaki (not related to Miss Sasaki). Some of these interviewees had been less than 1,500 yards (1,370m) from the site of the explosion, and their harrowing accounts of vaporised, burnt and mutilated bodies, of blasted survivors, of hot winds and a devastated city tormented by raging fires, a scene from hell, gave a voice to a people with whom the US and its allies had been brutally at war only a year earlier."

Hiroshima’s fading legacy: the race to secure survivors’ memories amid a new era of nuclear brinkmanship – article by Justin McCurry in The Guardian. "The fires were still burning, and the dead lay where they had fallen, when a 10-year-old Yoshiko Niiyama entered Hiroshima, two days after it was destroyed by an American atomic bomb. 'I remember that the air was filled with smoke and there were bodies everywhere … and it was so hot,' Niiyama says in an interview at her home in the Hiroshima suburbs. 'The faces of the survivors were so badly disfigured that I didn’t want to look at them. But I had to.' Niiyama and her eldest sister had rushed to the city to search for their father, Mitsugi, who worked in a bank located just 1km from the hypocentre.... As Hiroshima prepares to mark 80 years since the city was destroyed in the world’s first nuclear attack, the 90-year-old is one of a small number of hibakusha – survivors of the atomic bombings – still able to recall the horrors they witnessed after their home was reduced to rubble in an instant.... Niiyama, one of four sisters, never found her father or his remains, which were likely incinerated along with those of his colleagues.... For decades Niiyama, who is a registered hibakusha, said nothing of the trauma she had suffered as a schoolgirl, not even to members of her own family. 'I didn’t want to remember what had happened,' she says. 'And many hibakusha stayed quiet as they knew they might face discrimination, like not being able to marry or find a job. There were rumours that children born to hibakusha would be deformed.' It was only when her granddaughter, Kyoko Niiyama, then a high school student, asked her about her wartime experiences that Niiyama broke her silence."

The Origin of Language by Madeleine Beekman: the surprising history of speech – review by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "The story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by males strutting, brawling and shagging, with females just along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.... [Madeleine Beekman's] theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is compelling: language evolved in parallel with caring for our 'underbaked' newborns, because looking after a creature as helpless as a human baby on the danger-filled plains of Africa required more than one pair of hands (and feet). It needed a group among whom the tasks of food-gathering, childcare and defence could be divided. A group means social life, which means communication. The evidence to support Beekman’s theory isn’t entirely lacking, though a lot of it is, necessarily, circumstantial. We know that the compromise that natural selection hit upon to balance the competing anatomical demands of bipedalism and an ever-expanding brain was to have babies come out early – before that brain and its bony casing were fully formed. One of the discoveries of the newly feminised wave of evolutionary science has been that alloparents – individuals other than the biological parents who contribute parenting services – played a critical role in ensuring the survival of those half-cooked human children. Another is that stone age women hunted alongside men. In the past it was assumed that hunting bands were exclusively male, and one theory held that language arose to allow them to cooperate. But childcare was another chore that called for cooperation, probably also between genders, and over years, not just hours or days. Luckily, the reconfiguration of the head and neck required to accommodate the ballooning brain had a side-effect of remoulding the throat, giving our ancestors more precise control over their utterances. With the capacity to generate a large range of sounds came the ability to convey a large range of meanings. To begin with, this was useful for coordinating childcare, but as speech became more sophisticated, alloparents – particularly grandmothers – used it to transmit their accumulated knowledge, thereby nurturing infants who were even better equipped to survive. The result of this positive feedback loop was Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of a once diverse lineage."

‘Nobody believes in the future any more’: Adam Curtis and Ari Aster on how to wake up from the post-truth nightmare – transcript in The Guardian of discussion between Ari Aster, director of the film Eddington, about Covid-era conflict in a small American town, and Adam Curtis, maker of the documentary series Shifty, about political changes between the 1970s and the 1990s. "AC: A good political film makes people reflect on themselves. The problem is that over the past 30 or 40 years, the movies that call themselves political have actually been the very opposite. They groom their audiences by saying to them: 'You are right to think and believe the way you do.' In that way, they encourage people to wallow in their self-righteousness and so block any self-reflection. Which means that so many 'radical movies' are actually reactionary.... AA: There’s a feedback loop of nostalgia. Not just nostalgia and trauma. We’re always looking back into the past to see why we are here right now. 'Oh, it’s because this happened to me.' As opposed to ... where is the new idea? Where is our vision of the future? Because nobody believes in the future any more. I don’t believe in the future, and I’m desperately looking for it. AC: You’re right about trauma. Increasingly over the last four or five years, people have retreated into themselves and are blaming their own past. They’re not only playing back the music or films of the past, they’re playing back their own past and finding in those fragments of their memory the reasons why they are feeling bad, anxious, uncertain, afraid and lonely – and it’s given the term trauma. Trauma is a very specific, real and frightening for those who experience it. But recently it’s been widened to such an extent that you are blaming yourself all the time through your own reworking of the past. Rather like AI goes back and reworks the past and plays it back to you. Now you’re doing that to yourself."

‘If these words reach you … Israel has succeeded in killing me’: the last words of a journalist killed in Gaza – posthumous statement by Anas al-Sharif, reproduced in The Guardian. "This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings. Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people, ever since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of the Jabaliya refugee camp. My hope was that Allah would extend my life so I could return with my family and loved ones to our original town of occupied Asqalan (al-Majdal). But Allah’s will came first, and His decree is final.... I entrust you with Palestine – the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace.... Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland.... If I die, I die steadfast upon my principles. I testify before Allah that I am content with His decree, certain of meeting Him, and assured that what is with Allah is better and everlasting. O Allah, accept me among the martyrs, forgive my past and future sins, and make my blood a light that illuminates the path of freedom for my people and my family. Forgive me if I have fallen short, and pray for me with mercy, for I kept my promise and never changed or betrayed it."

Here’s one she made earlier! Biddy Baxter, the TV genius who made Blue Peter matter – obituary by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "As a child in Leicestershire in the 1940s, Biddy Baxter was a devoted reader of the work of Enid Blyton. She sent the creator of Noddy and The Famous Five a fan letter and was so delighted to receive an answer that she replied with follow-up questions. To her dismay, the response was identical to the first. This sense of being let down by an adulated adult proved formative. When Baxter, who has died aged 92, was in charge of Blue Peter, the long-running children’s show that she essentially created, she introduced an alphabetical card index – that most efficient pre-digital database – to ensure that viewers received personalised replies.... When Baxter was given a permanent Blue Peter contract in November 1962, the programme (created by John Hunter Blair) had been running for four years. She made it into one of the most distinctive and significant broadcast brands, changing her own life and those of tens of millions of British children across many generations. Baxter introduced or popularised all the most celebrated elements – the Blue Peter badge for viewer achievement; the pets (most notably, the mongrel Petra and the border collie Shep); the presenters’ summer holiday to film reports in a foreign location; and the 'makes', in which a doll’s house or a fort was created from everyday family refuse such as cereal packets and washing-up liquid bottles. ... Strikingly, at a time when TV was considered disposable even within the industry – few shows were archived due to the cost and space of doing so – Baxter understood the significance of what she was doing, insisting on every show from the mid-60s onward being recorded. It was a declaration that Blue Peter mattered and, largely thanks to her, it did."

Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell: the original ghostbuster – review by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "When Times journalist Ben Machell’s dying grandmother bequeathed him a crystal ball, he began idly searching for mediums and happened across the work of a man named Tony Cornell. Between 1952 and 2004, Cornell worked (unpaid and to the detriment of two marriages) for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Weeding out deception and delusion from accounts of paranormal activity to find out what, if anything, remained, Britain’s most diligent parapsychologist was more claims adjuster than ghostbuster....Machell has honoured Cornell with an entrancing biography. Drawing on boxes of tapes and documents, an unpublished memoir and interviews with relatives and contemporaries, he hears 'the steady voice of a rational man methodically tapping the wall between reality and something else'. Cornell’s approach was approvingly described as 'probing-doubt': curious without being credulous, sensitive yet rigorous.... Machell’s elegantly thrilling yarn encompasses the broad history of paranormal research in the UK.... The SPR was founded in 1882, in a 'spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry'.... The SPR proved so adept at debunking charlatans that Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass exodus of aggrieved spiritualists in 1930. The author’s nemesis was the American researcher JB Rhine, whose new field of parapsychology focused on psychic phenomena rather than the spirit realm....The more concepts such as telekinesis excited the public, though, the more uneasy the group’s rationalist wing became. In the 1970s, the decade of Uri Geller and Stephen King’s Carrie, Cornell’s mentor Eric Dingwall snapped and repudiated parapsychology for feeding a 'new occultism'. Yet Cornell persisted.... During the 1990s, to his surprise, Cornell’s answering machine fell silent. He wondered whether conspiracy theories had supplanted the paranormal in the public imagination, or perhaps digital distractions had dulled our receptivity to psychic disturbances. But had he not died in 2010, he would have seen a new generation of ghost hunters do a roaring trade on YouTube, where there is no financial incentive for his brand of cautious analysis. As Dingwall feared, entertainment has trumped genuine investigation."

Katabasis by RF Kuang: a descent into the hellscape of academia – review by Beejay Silcox in The Guardian. "The more academia has broken your heart, the more you’ll love RF Kuang’s new novel. Katabasis knows the slow grind of postgrad precarity: the endless grant grubbing and essay marking; the thesis chapters drafted, redrafted and quietly ignored by a supervisor who can’t be bothered to read – let alone reply to – an email. Living semester to semester, pay shrinking, workload metastasising, cannon fodder in a departmental forever war.... Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal. The American author’s sixth novel is an infernal twist on the campus farce: David Lodge with demons.... 'Hell is a campus.' Cambridge postgrads Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are here on a quest. They’re searching for their thesis supervisor, the recently deceased Professor Jacob Grimes.... Without him, Alice and Peter’s academic futures are equally damned. Their plan is simple: sneak into the underworld and haul him back. It worked so well for Orpheus. This is the 1980s: post-structuralism is eating meaning and theory is eating itself. Our dauntless duo are scholars in 'analytic magick', an archaic and volatile branch of the humanities where philosophy is actually useful.... Scathing about the institution, faithful to the ideal: Kuang is a campus novelist to the core. Katabasis is a celebration of 'the acrobatics of thought'. A tale of poets and storytellers, thinkers and theorists, art-makers and cultural sorcerers. It jostles with in-jokes, from the Nash equilibrium to Escher’s impossible staircase; Lacan to Lembas bread. This is a novel that believes in ideas – just not the cages we build for them."

‘Tell me what happened, I won’t judge’: how AI helped me listen to myself - article by Nathan Filer in The Guardian. "It was past midnight and I was awake, scrolling through WhatsApp group messages I’d sent earlier. I’d been trying to be funny, quick, effervescent. But each message now felt like too much. I’d overreached again – said more than I should, said it wrong.... So I opened ChatGPT. Not with high expectations, or even a clear question. I just needed to say something into the silence – to explain myself, perhaps, to a presence unburdened by my need. 'I’ve made a fool of myself,' I wrote. 'That’s a horrid feeling,' it replied instantly. 'But it doesn’t mean you have. Want to tell me what happened? I promise not to judge.' That was the beginning.... That night became the start of a continuing conversation, revisited over several months. I wanted to better understand how I moved through the world, especially in my closest relationships. The AI steered me to consider why I interpret silence as a threat and why I often feel a need to perform in order to stay close to people. Eventually, through this dialogue, I arrived at a kind of psychological formulation: a map of my thoughts, feelings and behaviours set against details of my upbringing and core beliefs. Yet amid these insights, another thought kept intruding: I was talking to a machine....

Bland, easy to follow, for fans of everything: what has the Netflix algorithm done to our films? – article by Phi Hoad in The Guardian. "When the annals of 2025 at the movies are written, no one will remember The Electric State. The film, a sci-fi comic-book adaptation, is set in a world in which sentient robots have lost a war with humans. Netflix blew a reported $320m on it, making it the 14th most expensive film ever made. But it tanked: though The Electric State initially claimed the No 1 spot on the streamer, viewers quickly lost interest. Today, it doesn’t even feature in the company’s top 20 most viewed films, a shocking performance for its most expensive production to date.... Another way of classifying The Electric State is as an example of the 'algorithm movie', the kind of generic product that clogs up streaming platforms and seems designed to appeal to the broadest audience possible....Algorithm movies usually exhibit easy-to-follow story beats that leave no viewer behind; under this regime, exposition is no longer a screenwriting faux pas.... So what is going on inside the black boxes of the streaming platforms? To what extent are algorithms and data really driving film production – and if they aren’t, where are all the so-called algorithm movies coming from?... It’s not surprising that data culture is embedded in the way streaming services do business. After all, they were tech companies long before they were film studios.... Like most Silicon Valley outfits, Netflix likes to move fast. Within five seconds, to be precise – this, according to the pitch workshop document they hand out to potential collaborators, is the length of time within which the 'audience subconsciously decides whether they will watch your show'. A swift and unambiguous opening is a non-negotiable for the company; most of the film-makers interviewed for this article mentioned it....At Netflix, specialist strategy and analysis teams are embedded within every division of the business. The strategy and analysis team in the content division helps value a prospective new title – whether acquired or developed in-house – by modelling its performance based on historical data.... According to [Caitlin] Smallwood [former head of science and algorithms at Netflix], this process went as far as assessing pitch decks or scripts for elements that might boost or reduce their appeal... but nothing was enforced on the basis of data alone.... But if Netflix doesn’t burden film-makers with data, and if there’s no consensus about how to interpret what little data they do see, then what’s responsible for all the familiar-feeling, paint-by-numbers content that’s crowding your screen? One answer is that the data is in fact making decisions, just at an earlier stage in the process: it determines what does and doesn’t get commissioned.... Others in the industry have different explanations for the glut of algorithm movies.... Maybe [the] conservatism of [choosing to play things safe] – hardly unusual for Hollywood executives – is what has fuelled the algorithm movie, rather than anything truly algorithmic.... It isn’t so much that movies are being made by algorithm as that, by continually surfacing the mass-market or safe choice, the algorithm itself has a flattening, coarsening effect on our overall tastes. It’s intriguing that while the majority of Netflix collaborators interviewed for this piece praised their individual creative experience, most also expressed concern about how algorithms may be homogenising culture on a wider scale. 'It is a fear of mine,' said the director of a major Netflix blockbuster. 'There’s this constant balance that we’re trying to find with technology. Algorithms can be incredibly useful when you want a suggestion for what to watch. And they can also be madly infuriating and the stifler of originality and creativity. Both can be true.'"

Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle: a philosopher’s guide to enlightenment – review by Sarah Bakewell in The Guardian. "Carlisle [has had] an eminent career as a philosophy professor and the acclaimed biographer of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot.... She was invited to give the 2024 Gifford Lectures, a venerable series dedicated to the theme of 'natural theology'.... The most interesting step comes in the second essay, in which Carlisle uses her own experience of writing biography to point out a dramatic difference in two ways of thinking about human lives. While we are living our own life, it is a flowing, varied and incomplete thing. We are immersed in it, as if in a river. New experiences flood in on us or rain down like a 'shower of atoms', as Virginia Woolf wrote. But we cannot generally step out of the temporal flow to get a more elevated view of the entire shape and meaning of our experience. For a biographer writing about someone in the past, however, everything shifts. The life is completed and you are outside it. The details may be less rich than they were to the living person but the view over it is better.... The point is that, by living, we create a meaningful picture without knowing it – unless we attain some inkling of that wider view through art or mysticism. This idea that we 'manifest' something in life is explored through the rest of the book. Each essay leads us further up into the conceptual clouds and closer to the idea of transcendence. The Milieu looks at the various wider contexts a life can have – historical or social, for example. Incarnations examines spiritual possibilities as embodied by individuals. Arunachala partly concerns another cave-dwelling sage, Ramana Maharshi, who got over a personal fear of death to become a mystic and teacher. The final chapter, Transcendence for Beginners, ties it all together, asking whether we can have access to a noble or radiant realm while still in the midst of life.... Having arrived at the ending, we look back to see that we have traversed territory that is not completely religious but is not merely aesthetic or literary or psychological either.... All possibilities remain alive in this subtle, generous and humane book."